At the end of every year, Marc sits down to give plaudits and raspberries to the sitting President of the United States. There’s a top 10 good and a top 10 bad, some honorable mentions in both categories, and generalized philosophizing on the same in the podcast. The #1s in both lists were well deserved, and mirror that lovely old rhyme — when he was good, he was very good, and when he was bad, he was awful.
You can read both pieces yourselves, but the #1 on the good list was Biden’s willingness to stand with Israel. It belongs there, and the plaudits are deserved. Of course, we are all holding our collective breath, waiting for what feels like the inevitable cave to the increasingly anti-Israel and antisemitic left of the Democratic Party. But it hasn’t happened yet, and that reflects courage and determination.
Numero uno on the naughty list is Biden’s decision to run again in 2024. Yes, we know why. Yes, we understand he’s reputedly the “only one” who can beat Trump. But the truth is that Joe Biden is too old to be president. It’s a brutal job, phenomenally hard on any POTUS, and Biden’s already well short of what any reasonable person would suggest is the necessary mental fitness to lead the free world. Sure, the rest of the Democratic Party has a problematic bench, yadda yadda. But we’ve got to move beyond both Trump and Biden and begin to test the next generation.
A word about Claudine Gay
What a dreadful person. An unrepentant antisemite. An unrepentant plagiarist. A grifter on the DEI scourge. And a terrible role model to the students of America. If she has any redeeming features, they have not been on display either during her testimony before Congress or since. Her bitter, whining, and shameless letter of resignation, while mercifully not lifted from another scholar’s work, nonetheless displayed a lack of originality, of insight, or of regret.
Indeed, we dare say that the best thing to come out of the Gay debacle was a lengthy tweet from investor and philanthropist Bill Ackman, who has been a champion of all that is good and right in this episode. Here’s a short excerpt:
A few weeks [after October 7], I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
Take the time and read the whole thing. Every time such an exegesis appears, I am forcibly reminded of the title of a book about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: Republic of Fear. Increasingly, we live in a republic of fear — fear to offend, fear to use the wrong words, fear to transgress new rules that change with the wind. And make no mistake, transgressing has real costs, particularly to those not as rich as Bill Ackman, not strong enough to withstand the opprobrium of the entitled elites. Look what happened to former New York Times editor James Bennet (or just read his piece here).
The truth problem
This isn’t really a minor rant, but more of a foreshadowing of a major rant to come. We all are aware of the curated nature of information: I read National Review, you read The Nation; I follow Ben Shapiro, you follow Rachel Maddow. We live in a free world, and there’s no sin in building your own echo chamber. As many have written, however, increasingly we live in our own bubbles and never actually meet people who disagree with us. This is hugely corrupting. And it has taken a toll on the very idea of truth.
The reason this proto-rant is here is because I get much of my news from the Middle East from Twitter, X, whatever. And almost every video, image and message from any pro-Israel or Israeli source is invariably labeled by commenters as counterfeit. The tunnels? Fake images. Gazans with plentiful food? AI. The al Shifa “hospital”/terror HQ? Lies. I could go on here, but you get the idea. We have not yet begun to talk seriously about how to manage what one Trump official artfully labeled “alternative facts.” It’s a conversation that needs to begin if we are not to move forward in various alternative political universes. Because that never ends well. More soon.
Your paragraph describing Claudine Gay was one for the ages, and spot on: "What a dreadful person. An unrepentant antisemite. An unrepentant plagiarist. A grifter on the DEI scourge. And a terrible role model to the students of America. If she has any redeeming features, they have not been on display either during her testimony before Congress or since. Her bitter, whining, and shameless letter of resignation, while mercifully not lifted from another scholar’s work, nonetheless displayed a lack of originality, of insight, or of regret."